The author of the Essaies saw Iroquois at Rouen, who, according to him, were "not verie ill; but what," he adds, "of that? They weare no kinde of breeches nor hosen[493]!"
If ever I publish the Στρωματεὶς or patchwork of my youth, to talk like St. Clement of Alexandria[494] you shall there see Mila[495].
The Canadians are no longer the same as when they were described by Cartier, Champlain[496], La Hontan[497], Lescarbot[498], Lafitau[499], Charlevoix[500], and the Lettres édifiantes; the sixteenth century and the commencement of the seventeenth were still the time of a boundless imagination and ingenuous customs: the marvel of the first reflected a virgin nature, and the candour of the second reproduced the simplicity of the savage. Champlain tells us at the end of his first journey to Canada, in 1603, that "near Chaleur Bay, verging to the south, there is an island where dwells a frightful monster which the savages call Gougou."
Canada had its giant as well as the Cape of Storms. Homer is the true father of all these inventions; it is always the Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis, ogres or gougous.
The savage population of North America, not including the Mexicans and Esquimaux, does not today amount to four hundred thousand souls on either side of the Rocky Mountains; there are travellers who put it so low as one hundred and fifty thousand. The degradation of Indian manners has kept pace with the depopulation of the tribes. Their religious traditions have become confused; the instruction spread by the Canadian Jesuits has mixed foreign ideas with the inborn ideas of the natives: through their rude fables, one sees the Christian beliefs disfigured; the majority of the savages wear crosses by way of ornaments, and the Protestant traders sell them what the Catholic missionaries give them. Let us say at once, to the honour of our country and to the glory of our religion, that the Indians had become greatly attached to us; that they never cease to regret us; and that a "black robe," or missionary, is still an object of veneration in the forests of America. The savage continues to love us under the tree where we were his first guests, on the soil which we have trod, where we have left tombs in his care.
When the Indian was naked or clad in skins, he had something great and noble about him; at present, rags of European clothing, without covering his nakedness, bear witness to his destitution: he is a beggar at the door of a counting-house, he is no longer the savage in his forest
Lastly, a kind of hybrid people has been formed, born of colonial fathers and Indian mothers. These men, called "Burnt-woods," because of the colour of their skin, act as brokers between the authors of their dual origin. They speak the language of their fathers and of their mothers, and have the vices of both races. These bastards of civilized and of savage nature sell themselves to the Americans and the English by turns, to hand over to them the monopoly of the fur-trade; they keep alive the rivalry between the English companies, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company, and the American companies, the Columbian American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company and others: they themselves go hunting for account of the traders and with hunters paid by the companies.
The Wars of the Companies.
The great war of American Independence is the only one which people know of. They are ignorant of the fact that blood has been shed on behalf of the paltry interests of a handful of merchants. The Hudson's Bay Company in 1811 sold to Lord Selkirk[501] a tract of land on the bank of the Red River. The North-West or Canadian Company took umbrage at this transaction. The two companies, allied to various Indian tribes and seconded by the "Burnt-woods," came to blows. This domestic conflict, so horrible in its details, took place on the frozen wastes of Hudson's Bay. Lord Selkirk's colony was destroyed in the month of June 1815[502], at the exact period of the Battle of Waterloo. Upon those two theatres, one so brilliant, the other so obscure, the misfortunes of the human species were the same.